Friday, April 27, 2018

An open letter to Jack Phillips

[Jack Phillips is the owner of the Masterpiece Cake Shop in Lakewood, Colorado. Mr. Phillips is being sued by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. His case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yesterday Mr. Phillips published an op-ed in The Washington Post to which this letter is a response.]

Dear Mr. Phillips:

Imagine your child was in a terrible car accident and rushed to the hospital. There the doctor tells you, "I'm terribly sorry, but she has lost a lot of blood. She needs a transfusion. Unfortunately, I can't give her one because I am a Jehovah's Witness and we believe that blood transfusions are against the will of God." (Don't like that example? OK, here's another: suppose the doctor was a Muslim and told you that he couldn't operate on your daughter because she is female, and unfortunately there are no female doctors available at the moment. I can do this all day long. There is an endless variety of sincerely held religious beliefs out there in the world.)

How would you feel? Would you fight as hard for the right of doctors to refuse their professional services on religious grounds as you are fighting for your own? Would you accept delayed medical care for your daughter as the price of religious freedom?

I suspect the answer to that question is "no", but either way you and I have a problem that goes far beyond cakes. If indeed you want the Supreme Court to uphold your religious freedom but not those of others then you are a hypocrite, and we're done. I have no respect for hypocrites. Hypocrisy is the ultimate evil because it justifies anything. If, on the other hand, your answer is "yes", that you would be able to accept these costs, then we still have a problem, but it's a very different problem, because not only are you willing to accept these costs on your own behalf, but you are insisting that I accept these costs as well. Because if my daughter ends up in the hospital and needs a transfusion, I want her to fucking get one. Got it?

I apologize for the crude language, but I really want to emphasize how strongly I feel about this. You see, my most deeply held belief, my religion if you will, is that decisions ought to be made according to evidence, experiment and reason, and not on faith. You have the right to believe what you want, but you most emphatically do not have the right to impose your beliefs on me in any way, shape, or form. That includes passing laws to allow doctors to deprive me and mine of medical care because of their own personal beliefs.

You see, in a professional setting, sometimes you have to check your personal beliefs at the door. As unintuitive as it might seem, that is part and parcel of living in a free country. Doctors don't get to pick and choose who they treat and how they treat them based on their religion. Judges don't get to pick and choose what laws they will enforce based on their religious beliefs. Restaurant proprietors don't get to pick and choose who can sit at the lunch counter based on their religious beliefs.

I know you think your case is different because making wedding cakes is an artistic endeavor, and I don't dispute that. I'm happy to concede that your cakes are works of art. But you are not actually arguing for your freedom of expression. You are not refusing to make cakes with particular content, you are refusing to make cakes for a particular kind of customer. If you refused to make a cake with, say, an obscene image on it, no one would dispute your right to turn that down. But what you are asking for is very different. You want to be able to refuse to make cakes for gay couples regardless of what the cake looks like. Your criterion for what you are and are not willing to do has nothing to do with the cake and everything to do with the customer. That is unacceptable.

You wonder "if there will be a place in the community for [you] when the dust settles." I'm sure there will. This country is, sadly, chock-full of people who want to discriminate against others because of their sexual orientation. Should you lose, I have no doubt that you will find friends among them. And although you will find it hard to believe, you will still be free. You will be free to believe what you want to believe. You will be free to shout your odious beliefs from the rooftops. You will even be free to make cakes for whomever you choose! The only thing you won't be able to do is to make cakes professionally, because, in this country, we hold professionals to a higher standard.

At least, for the sake of all the people who need blood transfusions, I hope we do.

The back of the bus arrives at the destination at the same time as the front does, so what difference does it make if black folks have to sit there? The colored water fountain dispenses the same water as the whites-only one, so what difference does it make if there are two water fountains?

It doesn't matter whether the stakes are life-threatening or trivial, and it doesn't matter if you treat everyone the same except for this "one little thing". Second-class citizenship is still second-class citizenship.

To be impartial, I should say that my reasoning allows anyone and all non-governmental parties to deny the space and resources for whatever religious services they dislike. That means that a chair company could refuse to sell to the Westboro Baptist Church, for example. The definition of 'religious service' here is important; I would say something along the lines of "a celebration of some idiosyncratic understanding of 'the good'", where 'idiosyncratic' merely means "not required to be shared by all Americans". One of the key aspects of political liberalism is that the government imposes as tiny a notion of 'the good' as is possible, to allow maximum freedom to citizens to choose.

With the way things are going, if Jack Phillips gets his way and the sentiment toward LGBT continues shifting in America as it has in the last thirty years, then certain Christians will be setting up mechanisms of discrimination which can be used against them. We could call these mechanisms of discrimination "playing with fire".

The above being said, your examples continue to fail to be analogies to a marriage ceremony. The State does not care one whit whether you have a marriage ceremony and how you have it. It cannot tell you how to have that ceremony. We consider this a good thing. But if it can force people to knowingly participate in the ceremony (in any way!), then it can establish religion in collusion with citizens. Feel free to disagree with me; I haven't rigorously tested this logic, although it did pass the smell test at a conference at Stanford, The New Politics of Church/​State Relations. I was part of a discussion about whether bakers should be forced to bake not for gay persons, but for gay weddings.

Incidentally, suppose that Jack Phillips gets his way. I predict that this will strengthen gay marriages because struggles either draw people together or fling them apart; those who stay together through the harrowing process of getting a wedding ceremony together will be more likely to stick together going forward. If this process were iterated forward, I could see gay marriages becoming stronger than heterosexual marriages. If that happens, it would falsify [certain] Christian predictions of how "gay marriage will undermine the family" in a pretty hilarious way.

P.S. If you equate "who I am" with "what I do", then to prevent neo-Nazis from getting cakes with swastikas printed on them is to deny their identity expression. If they are as offensive to you as "the gay lifestyle" is Jack Phillips, who are you to choose which actions are allowed and which are is denied? Who is immediately hurt by a cake being made with a swastika printed on it? If you want to say that we should care more about "immediately", I will want to talk about Are there laws which govern minds? :-)

> I should say that my reasoning allows anyone and all non-governmental parties to deny the space and resources for whatever religious services they dislike.

So you think that a Christian doctor should be allowed to refuse to treat an Imam because they believe that Islam is false and they don't want to facilitate the spread of false beliefs? This is a perfectly defensible religious belief. In fact, it is much more defensible than refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding, because so much more is at stake: if a Christian doctor saves the life of a Muslim they run the risk that this Muslim will go on to convert people to Islam who might otherwise have been Christian and saved from eternal hell fire.

> Incidentally, suppose that Jack Phillips gets his way. I predict that this will strengthen gay marriages

Did you know that advocates of negro slavery argued that it was moral because it exposed blacks to Christianity, which made it a net win for them?

You should be ashamed of yourself for even entertaining such an argument.

> to prevent neo-Nazis from getting cakes with swastikas printed on them

You seem to have missed this bit in the original letter:

"If you refused to make a cake with, say, an obscene image on it, no one would dispute your right to turn that down."

You have the right to refuse to make a cake with a swastika on it, but you have to be consistent: you have to refuse to make swastika cakes for *everyone* whether or not they are Nazis. (And as long as we're talking about failed analogies, do you really think that there is a comparison between making a wedding cake for a gay wedding and making a cake with a swastika on it?)

Mr. Phillips is not arguing that he should be able to refuse to make cakes for gay weddings because the *cake* is obscene. Cakes for gay weddings look exactly the same as cakes for straight weddings. He wants to refuse to make cakes for gay weddings because he thinks the activity in which his customers will choose to use those cakes is sinful. That crosses a very important line.

> Luke: (i) Our discussion at a Dialogos event about democracy being a way to keep people from objecting to how they're being governed;

> Ron: (i) - I said that's the way it was. I didn't say I was happy about it.

? Here, you carefully separate between descriptive and prescriptive/​normative. Or have I misunderstood?

> You seem to have missed this bit in the original letter:> > "If you refused to make a cake with, say, an obscene image on it, no one would dispute your right to turn that down."> > You have the right to refuse to make a cake with a swastika on it, but you have to be consistent: you have to refuse to make swastika cakes for *everyone* whether or not they are Nazis.

(1) Who defines what constitutes "obscene"? The local culture? The state culture? The national culture? (One can question whether there is just 'one' at each level.)

(2) What's to stop a cake bakery from claiming to refuse to service any wedding, and then discriminating based on the wink system, where the heterosexual couples pretend to just be getting a random cake when everyone knows they are getting it for a wedding?

(3) What if neo-Nazis adopt some allegedly innocent symbol, have cake bakers print it on the cake, and then make a simple modification to turn it exceedingly obscene and offensive? You know humans can game such a system. Pepe the Frog was just the beginning. This reminds me of "opposite day" at school, which I was never quite fast enough to detect.

What you're supposing, at core, is that law is the way to solve the problem. Could you be possibly wrong about this? That is, could human nature be such that law can never actually constrain the kind of bad behavior you would like to constrain?

> He wants to refuse to make cakes for gay weddings because he thinks the activity in which his customers will choose to use those cakes is sinful. That crosses a very important line.

On that basis, it is wrong for producers of lethal injection drugs to refuse to sell it to states for use in human lethal injection, because just believing that the use will be "sinful" is not a sufficient basis for producer-initiated discrimination. If you want to talk about "what constitutes harm" (e.g. WP: Harm principle), please tell me how far down the legal rabbit hole you want to go. (That is, can the harm principle be encoded into law in a non-arbitrary way which cannot be endlessly gamed?)

> You're getting sloppy. "treat an Imam" is not a 'religious service'.

Before you accuse me of being sloppy you need to re-read your own words:

"my reasoning allows anyone and all non-governmental parties to deny the space AND RESOURCES for whatever religious services they dislike" [emphasis added]

If an Imam is not a "resource" for a religious service then I have no idea what you're talking about.

But fine, let's take a less emotionally fraught example: do you think a plumber should be free to refuse to fix the toilet in a mosque? What about in a Christian church whose congregation is predominantly black?

> I do believe that a Christian doctor should be allowed to (i) refuse to perform euthanasia;

Really? On what grounds?

Should a JW doctor be allowed to refuse to give blood transfusions?

> have I misunderstood?

Taking your comments in this thread as a whole, you seem to me to be arguing against my position, and in favor of allowing Mr. Phillips to discriminate against gay people. Have I misunderstood? Because if I haven't, then saying that discrimination will "strengthen gay marriage" sounds an awful lot like an argument in support of that position, and you should be ashamed.

On the other hand, if you really do agree with me that the Supreme Court should rule against Mr. Phillips, then you have done an extraordinarily good job of concealing that from me.

> Who defines what constitutes "obscene"? The local culture? The state culture? The national culture?

All of the above. It's not a clean distinction. It's something society has to struggle with.

> What's to stop a cake bakery from claiming to refuse to service any wedding, and then discriminating based on the wink system

Nothing. Civil rights have been denied to black people this way for decades despite it being against the law. (And no, I don't think that's a good thing.)

> You know humans can game such a system.

Yes, of course I know this. Hence: struggle.

But all of this is irrelevant in this case because THIS IS NOT THE ARGUMENT THAT MR. PHILLIPS IS ADVANCING. The customers in this case did not specify the design of the cake. They asked Mr. Phillips to design it, and he refused. He did not refuse because of the content of the cake (that was up to him to decide). He refused, by his own admission, because of the sexual orientation of the customer. So there is no dispute on the facts: Mr. Phillips wants to discriminate based NOT on content and NOT on what his customer *does*, but rather based on what his customer *is*. That is unacceptable no matter how convinced you are that you are discriminating for good and noble reasons.

> What you're supposing, at core, is that law is the way to solve the problem.

No. Not *the* way. But just because something only solves part of the problem is no excuse for not doing it.

> On that basis, it is wrong for producers of lethal injection drugs to refuse to sell it to states for use in human lethal injection

If they object on *religious* grounds, then yes, absolutely. But there are valid secular arguments against capital punishment, and hence valid secular arguments for refusing to sell products for this purpose. There are NO valid secular arguments against gay marriage.

> If an Imam is not a "resource" for a religious service then I have no idea what you're talking about.

People are not "resources". They're people. This is one reason I get really annoyed at people who refer to human beings with "that" instead of "who/​whom". People are not objects!

> But fine, let's take a less emotionally fraught example: do you think a plumber should be free to refuse to fix the toilet in a mosque? What about in a Christian church whose congregation is predominantly black?

I would like to explore the possibility that the moral marketplace could out-compete such behavior. I would also like to explore the possibility of people morally self-sorting/​self-organizing yielding useful information. By the way, in such a scheme, you could give yourself and people who agree with you the responsibility of never hiring "discriminatory" plumbers. Now, if those who are rather more well-off than the average citizen were to choose that way, what would happen?

I also realize that there can be market failure when it comes to morality, just like there can be market failure when it comes to economics. Similarly, a planned morality might have some of the same pathologies of a planned market.

> > I do believe that a Christian doctor should be allowed to (i) refuse to perform euthanasia;

> Really? On what grounds?

The Hippocratic Oath.

> Should a JW doctor be allowed to refuse to give blood transfusions?

See above on "moral marketplace". And oh by the way, my wife had a health condition when she was born which was usually treated with a blood transfusion. Her parents, being doctors and knowing that maybe blood was "tainted" (it was called GRID back then and we didn't know how it worked), absolutely refused to have a transfusion performed unless it was absolutely necessary. That choice may have saved my wife's life. Note very carefully that this was before there was sufficient EE&R to "justify" withholding a blood transfusion.

> Taking your comments in this thread as a whole, you seem to me to be arguing against my position, and in favor of allowing Mr. Phillips to discriminate against gay people. Have I misunderstood?

I am arguing for no position at this point in time; I am exploring the space of options and doing the best I can to ensure that valid distinctions are made and invalid distinctions are quashed.

> On the other hand, if you really do agree with me that the Supreme Court should rule against Mr. Phillips, then you have done an extraordinarily good job of concealing that from me.

False dichotomy. In addition to "for" and "against", there can be "neutral". The neutrality is about what the right legal framework is to deal with the situation. That is very different from the right moral framework. Surely you can appreciate the difference. Surely you do not believe that all morality ought to be legislated?

> But all of this is irrelevant in this case because THIS IS NOT THE ARGUMENT THAT MR. PHILLIPS IS ADVANCING. The customers in this case did not specify the design of the cake. They asked Mr. Phillips to design it, and he refused.

Sure; instead they made clear that Mr. Phillips knows the meaning of the symbol. And what you're saying is that we ought never be allowed to discriminate based on meaning. Instead, we can only discriminate at the symbolic level and so if the symbol is used somewhere to mean one thing and somewhere else to mean another, economic producers are banned from discriminating.

> He refused, by his own admission, because of the sexual orientation of the customer.

The sexual orientation, or the purpose of the cake being to celebrate a same-sex marriage? These are two different things. Identity and behavior are not identical. Identity and desires are not identical.

> So there is no dispute on the facts: Mr. Phillips wants to discriminate based NOT on content and NOT on what his customer *does*, but rather based on what his customer *is*.

That seems to be rather false:

>> Everyone is welcome in my shop — be it homeless folks (many of whom I’ve befriended over coffee, cookies and conversation), the two men who are suing me, or anyone else who finds their way in. The God that I serve, whose arms are open to all, expects that of me, and it is my joy to obey Him. But creating a cake that celebrates a view of marriage in conflict with my faith is not something that I can do. (I’m the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker. Will the Supreme Court uphold my freedom?)

> > What you're supposing, at core, is that law is the way to solve the problem.

> No. Not *the* way. But just because something only solves part of the problem is no excuse for not doing it.

s/the way/a necessary part of the way/

> > On that basis, it is wrong for producers of lethal injection drugs to refuse to sell it to states for use in human lethal injection

> If they object on *religious* grounds, then yes, absolutely. But there are valid secular arguments against capital punishment, and hence valid secular arguments for refusing to sell products for this purpose. There are NO valid secular arguments against gay marriage.

> Luke: To be impartial, I should say that my reasoning allows anyone and all non-governmental parties to deny the space and resources for whatever religious services they dislike.

? I don't know if I can use 'objects', because you might think humans are objects, too. So I guess I'll go with "non-human resources" for now. But I'm sure you'll be able to find some niggling exception such that "[I] should be ashamed of [my]self". Go ahead, I'll wait.

> The Hippocratic oath is not a religious doctrine, and it doesn't apply only to Christian doctors, so this is a non-sequitur.

I doubt you can define 'religious doctrine' in a non-question-begging way, such that it really can be distinguished from 'secular reasons'.

> Could have fooled me.

You could have fooled me when it came to your attitude wrt 'democracy'.

How you choose to communicate is up to you. But. at the risk of stating what should be painfully obvious, language doesn't really fulfill its intended purpose if everyone starts using their own private definitions for words.

> I doubt you can define 'religious doctrine' in a non-question-begging way, such that it really can be distinguished from 'secular reasons'.

A religious doctrine is one that is claimed to be true because it is revealed by a deity.

> How you choose to communicate is up to you. But. at the risk of stating what should be painfully obvious, language doesn't really fulfill its intended purpose if everyone starts using their own private definitions for words.

1. a source of supply, support, or aid, especially one that can be readily drawn upon when needed. 2. resources, the collective wealth of a country or its means of producing wealth. 3. Usually, resources. money, or any property that can be converted into money; assets. 4. Often, resources. an available means afforded by the mind or one's personal capabilities:to have resource against loneliness. 5. an action or measure to which one may have recourse in an emergency; expedient. 6. capability in dealing with a situation or in meeting difficulties:a woman of resource

However, you always have the choice of looking for [non-private!] meanings which paint the other person in a less bad light. Instead, knowing me as much as you do, you chose an interpretation which yielded: "You should be ashamed of yourself for even entertaining such an argument." Might one of the wrong things about our culture be the tendency to quickly jump to a negative assessment of the Other, in the teeth of a decent track record? (Or do I not have a decent track record, with you? Please be brutally honest; my emotions can go die.)

> A religious doctrine is one that is claimed to be true because it is revealed by a deity.

What about those forms of Buddhism which do not have a deity? What about animism? How about the fact that Secular Humanism Is a Religion, Legally Speaking? And really, if we take a Feuerbachian understanding of 'deity', it is just the collective projection of a society. How is that any different from:

> Luke: (1) Who defines what constitutes "obscene"? The local culture? The state culture? The national culture? (One can question whether there is just 'one' at each level.)

> Ron: All of the above. It's not a clean distinction. It's something society has to struggle with.

I don't see very many Buddhists trying to use a religious-freedom argument to turn people into second-class citizens. When they do, you can ask me again.

> So are there 'secular reasons' for anything?

Yes. (And, BTW, the earth is round too.)

Oh, you wanted a less dismissive answer? Sorry, you won't get one, at least not from me. Fish's article advances a classic argument from ignorance: "I (and my peer group) cannot see how X could be possible, therefore X cannot be possible." It is the same form of argument advanced by young-earth creationists, lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, and flat-earthers. Asking "are there secular reasons for anything" is no different from asking "can a religious person really be a scientist?" Yes, of course there are, and of course they can. Don't be daft.

> Oh, you wanted a less dismissive answer? Sorry, you won't get one, at least not from me. Fish's article advances a classic argument from ignorance: "I (and my peer group) cannot see how X could be possible, therefore X cannot be possible." It is the same form of argument advanced by young-earth creationists, lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, and flat-earthers. Asking "are there secular reasons for anything" is no different from asking "can a religious person really be a scientist?" Yes, of course there are, and of course they can. Don't be daft.

Your response is a classic answer from taken-for-grantedness—that which we believe but don't necessary have justification for. Here's a bit of exposition:

>> Every human society rests on assumptions that, most of the time, are not only unchallenged but not even reflected upon. In other words, in every society there are patterns of thought that most people accept without question as being of the very nature of things. Alfred Schutz called the sum of these "the world-taken-for-granted," which provides the parameters and the basic programs for our everyday lives. Robert and Helen Lynd, in their classic studies of Middletown, pointed to the same phenomenon with their concept of "of course statements"—statements that people take for granted to such a degree that, if questioned about them, they will preface their answer with "of course." These socially established patterns of thought provide the individual with what, paraphrasing Erving Goffman, we might call his basic reality kit—the cognitive and normative tools for the construction of a coherent universe in which to live. It is difficult to see how social life would be possible without this. But specific institutions and specific vested interests are also legitimated by such taken-for-granted patterns of thought. Thus a threat to the taken-for-granted quality of the legitimating thought patterns can very quickly become a threat to the institutions being legitimated, and to the individuals who have a stake in the institutional status quo. (Facing Up to Modernity, xii–xiii)

Ask someone in middle ages Europe: did Jesus rise bodily from the dead? You'll almost certainly get an "of course". Press for justification and things would almost certainly get hazy. That's what happened here, except I pressed you and you refused to even move one step in the direction of justification.

The point of the Stanley Fish article was provocation to check out Steven D. Smith's book. Here's a section I've posted repeatedly online—I may have even presented it to you:

>> No one expects that anything called "reason" will dispel such pluralism by leading people to converge on a unified truth—certainly not about ultimate or cosmic matters such as "the nature of the universe" or "the end and the object of life." Indeed, unity on such matters could be achieved only by state coercion: Rawls calls this the "fact of oppression."[36] So a central function of "public reason" today is precisely to keep such matters out of public deliberation (subject to various qualifications and exceptions that Rawls conceded as his thinking developed). And citizens practice Rawlsian public reason when they refrain from invoking or acting on their "comprehensive doctrines"—that is, their deepest convictions about what is really true—and consent to work only with a scaled-down set of beliefs or methods that claim the support of an ostensible "overlapping consensus".[37] (The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, 14–15)

Do you think what he says here is plausible? I'd be happy to buy you the book. In a sense, you could see it is a massive attack on any attempt to use EE&R in the ethical domain. It is an evidence-based attack; Smith is a lawyer. The devil is in the details and the law deals with the details.

Is anyone asserting their right under their first-amendment freedom of religion to discriminate against people in the name of Marxism?

> Your response is a classic answer from taken-for-grantedness

Do you think that the question of whether or not Christians can be scientists should actually be open for debate? What about whether black people should be slaves?

> Do you think what he says here is plausible?

Plausible? It isn't even parseable.

There are certain things that I expect people who wish to engage in civil discourse to take for granted. Among these are that atheism is not a pre-requisite for doing science, humans ought not to be treated as property, and no one should be discriminated against in the public sphere without a damn good reason.

If you don't believe these things that is your right. But those who profess to believe these things are not welcome in my house.

in a professional setting, sometimes you have to check your personal beliefs at the door

I agree with this, but I do think it makes a difference what kind of profession you're in. Wedding cakes are not the same as lifesaving services, so the latter professionals (doctors), for example, should be held to a higher standard of having to check their personal beliefs at the door than the former.

I also note that Phillips says in the article that he has suffered a 40% loss of business. While it appears that that wasn't just based on people individually choosing to do business with him--the government forced him to stop designing wedding cakes--this does point out another difference between him and, say, a doctor: people have the option to just not do business with him, an option that someone with a life-threatening illness does not have if the only doctor available has personal beliefs that conflict with theirs.

To be clear: I have no sympathy with Phillips' expressed desire to "belong". He's excluding a huge group of people; he should be willing to take it as well as dish it out, and he should understand that the reactions he's seeing from so many people are because his beliefs are offensive. But I'm also uneasy about our society's tendency to view situations as "essentially the same" without taking notice of highly significant differences between them.

> But I'm also uneasy about our society's tendency to view situations as "essentially the same" without taking notice of highly significant differences between them.

I just read the following to a lawyer friend of mine:

>> This is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences we are now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unintelligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.>> In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted. This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided no doubt by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex. Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state. (Ideas Have Consequences, 1–2)

She really liked it, and I do too. It seems to offer a wonderful [partial] diagnosis of the current state of affairs in the US. Weaver wrote this in 1948; his "modern man has become a moral idiot" is well-justified by Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue and following. Another analysis is Charles Taylor's 1989 Explanation and Practical Reason. Taylor picks apart two radically different kinds of reasoning:

(I) based on what one takes to be absolute, universal values (II) based on what the other person claims to value

Taylor argues that (II) can be rather more effective than (I). Unfortunately, Taylor notes (and I agree), modernity has shifted largely to (I). The Enlightenment "civilized" everyone else—it was not civilized/​judged by anyone. I posit that you cannot legislate morality, that all you can do is prohibit the icky from appearing too much on the surface while it festers below. But the festering below intensifies and ultimately erupts. "Out of sight, out of mind" is a terrible way to deal with this stuff. As Jim Crow showed. One has to somehow attack the spirit. In my opinion.

> Is anyone asserting their right under their first-amendment freedom of religion to discriminate against people in the name of Marxism?

I am sensing an odd toggling in your reasoning, between absolute principles and the kind of legal reasoning whereby if there is no injured party, the law cannot even be discussed in courts. (The Scopes trial is an example of such an "injured party" finally showing up.) Am I correct in my inference or would you model yourself as doing something different?

> > Your response is a classic answer from taken-for-grantedness

> Do you think that the question of whether or not Christians can be scientists should actually be open for debate?

Yes. See the NYT op-ed A Man of Faith, a Leader in Science?, which documents Sam Harris criticizing Francis Collins' competence for serving as director of the NIH. I think it is very important that Harris' words be exposed to public discussion. I think that rational evisceration of the argument is infinitely superior to public shaming. I think the former actually destroys evil "spirits", while I suspect the latter just drives the shamed underground—for a time.

> What about whether black people should be slaves?

I'm going to answer this circuitously: I think there were better ways to end slavery in America than were chosen, and they involve a rather more subtle attack on the spirit of the Cornerstone Speech than flatly declaring that all slavery is wrong. Suppose I am right (can you admit that there might have been better ways?). If so, then your question and how you've framed it can be an impediment, if not an enemy, to moral progress. However, I acknowledge that it is kind of disgusting to think of anything other than just screaming, at the top of one's lungs, that "Slavery is absolutely wrong!!!" Then again, have you been to slaveryfootprint.org? If slaves are working to produce anything you consume, how much energy is worth it for you to make different choices (include going without) so that no slave is in your supply chain?

> Plausible? It isn't even parseable.

You seem to have lost patience for any further discussion on that topic (because you gave the old compiler error of mere "Fail." rather than more detail). Did I infer properly?

> There are certain things that I expect people who wish to engage in civil discourse to take for granted. Among these are that atheism is not a pre-requisite for doing science, humans ought not to be treated as property, and no one should be discriminated against in the public sphere without a damn good reason.> > If you don't believe these things that is your right. But those who profess to believe these things are not welcome in my house.

When it comes to atheism and science, I simply beat atheists who claim to respect the evidence at their own game, by asking them for evidence that:

(1) When a scientist becomes an atheist, [s]he does better science. (2) When a scientist becomes religious, [s]he does worse science.

In my experience (and I have used the above at least 5 times online in the past few years), this eviscerates the argument much better than trying to establish something in a taken-for-granted fashion. My interlocutor binds himself/​herself to the rule of respecting the evidence and then I use that binding to destroy that which is incompatible. Now, possibly the atheist could say, "Well, I respect the evidence everywhere but there"—but I've never actually encountered that. I haven't had to shun anyone in doing the above; rationality wins.

When it comes to humans being treated as property, that's more difficult if the humans are viewed as sub-human. You perhaps cannot comprehend anyone believing that in a non-caricature fashion, so let's switch to the monkey selfie copyright issue. Should a non-human organism which cannot have discussions like you and I are now (in a way we can see them) be allowed to have copyright? Keep in mind that maybe we are just too dumb to teach macaques how to think and reason and do science. Maybe we are merely pretending or justifying that brain size is an issue. Maybe we're just being species-ist. Could you accept that maybe it'd only take 10,000 human-hours to get monkeys doing science? That we've been experimenting all this time on beings able to experiment on us if "it" were just given enough training?

Again I go to a deeper principle: if you dominate and subjugate others, you authorize anyone and everyone to dominate and subjugate you. This is a simple principle of ethical symmetry. It is the antithesis to "Might makes right". And it seems that humans have some sense of symmetry built into them fairly deeply; see for example the NYT article The Moral Life of Babies. We could get even more intense and suggest that in psychology, "every action has an equal and opposite reaction", so in dominating and subjugating others, one is actually doing that to oneself as well—somehow. Maybe science is getting good enough to start testing this hypothesis of mine.

> If you don't believe these things that is your right. But those who profess to believe these things are not welcome in my house.

You missed a negative. Do I get banned from your house because I believe "atheism is not a pre-requisite for doing science" and "humans ought not to be treated as property" based on deeper premises? I'm tempted to agree with "no one should be discriminated against in the public sphere without a damn good reason", except I don't want to be so harsh with law that more Jim Crow laws pop up.

> I do think it makes a difference what kind of profession you're in. Wedding cakes are not the same as lifesaving services

That's true. I chose the transfusion example not because you can die without one, but because there really are people who object to them on religious grounds, so this is not a hypothetical. (Christian Scientists are even more extreme than Jehovah's Witnesses, BTW. They reject *all* medical treatment, preferring instead to put their medical fates in the hands of God.) Our society has come a long way and it is, happily, getting harder and harder to find real examples of people invoking personal freedom arguments to defend discrimination. But drawing the line at medical necessity is nonetheless extremely dangerous. It was not that long ago that people fought for the right to decline to serve black people at restaurants. I *hope* we have reached consensus that that is not OK, even if someone thinks that God told them not to serve black people.

The fundamental problem with allowing people to use religion to exempt themselves from civic responsibility is that it requires the government to get into the business of deciding what is and is not a legitimate religious belief. When this happens (and it does) the beliefs that the government blesses as legitimate tend to be (surprise, surprise) Christian ones. When an employer wants to deny birth control to their employees on religious grounds, that's OK. But I'll bet an employer who wants to enforce sharia law at the office, and hence only hire people who are willing to convert to Islam, would get a great deal less sympathy.

> if there is no injured party, the law cannot even be discussed in courts

That is generally true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)

> See the NYT op-ed A Man of Faith, a Leader in Science?

Even better, see Sam Harris's original piece:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/opinion/27harris.html

Harris is not questioning Collins's fitness on the grounds that he's a Christian, he's questioning it on the grounds that Collins is espousing the belief that atheists cannot be moral. And I am totally with Harris on that one. Atheists are one of the few groups (along with gays and Muslims) against whom discrimination is still socially acceptable in the U.S.

> You seem to have lost patience

Yep, pretty much.

> When it comes to atheism and science, I simply beat atheists who claim to respect the evidence at their own game, by asking them for evidence that...

Well, that won't work on me because I have *explicitly* disclaimed the position that atheism causes better science precisely because there is no evidence for it. (I do believe that science produces atheism, and there *is* evidence for that.)

Not only did I explicitly disclaim that position, I did it *in the very comment to which you were responding*. And that is why I have lost patience with you. You don't listen.

> > If you don't believe these things that is your right. But those who profess to believe these things are not welcome in my house.

> You missed a negative.

No, I don't think so. I know (or at least I'm pretty damn sure) that you don't believe these things. You are not the person I'm banning from my house. My quarrel with you is that you are arguing (AFAICT) that I am not giving bigots a fair hearing, and that this makes me a hypocrite. That is not quite as offensive to me as actually calling for the re-enslavement of negroes or making people into second-class citizens because of their sexual orientation, so that doesn't get you banned from my house.

However, it also doesn't get a considered response from me. If you really think there's a moral equivalence between bigotry and intolerance of bigotry then we're just going to have to agree to disagree about that. You are too far gone for me to try to save. Life is too short.

"I simply beat atheists who claim to respect the evidence at their own game"

I am an atheist who claims to respect the evidence, so it's quite a reasonable inference, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, to read this as:

"I simply beat atheists who claim to respect the evidence (like you) at their own game"

> Are you asking me to accept 100% fault?

I am not *asking* you to do anything. I am *telling you* that you don't listen. And now I am also telling you that you often express yourself in ways that invite misunderstanding, and then you try to shirk responsibility when you are misunderstood. I am also telling you that I find all this to be very annoying, and you are reaching the limits of my tolerance for it. You can do whatever you choose to with this information, I really don't care. (Well, that's not true. I do care. But I'm pretty pissed off right now, so my compassion is being overshadowed by my anger.)

> Ron: Oh, you wanted a less dismissive answer? Sorry, you won't get one, at least not from me. Fish's article advances a classic argument from ignorance: "I (and my peer group) cannot see how X could be possible, therefore X cannot be possible."

Luke: Your response is a classic answer from taken-for-grantedness—that which we believe but don't necessary have justification for.> ⋮> Do you think what he says here is plausible?

> Ron: There are certain things that I expect people who wish to engage in civil discourse to take for granted. Among these are that atheism is not a pre-requisite for doing science, humans ought not to be treated as property, and no one should be discriminated against in the public sphere without a damn good reason.>> If you don't believe these things that is your right. But those who profess to believe these things are not welcome in my house.

> Luke : When it comes to atheism and science, I simply beat atheists who claim to respect the evidence at their own game, by asking them for evidence that: …

> Ron: Well, that won't work on me because I have *explicitly* disclaimed the position that atheism causes better science precisely because there is no evidence for it. (I do believe that science produces atheism, and there *is* evidence for that.)> > Not only did I explicitly disclaim that position, I did it *in the very comment to which you were responding*. And that is why I have lost patience with you. You don't listen.

I never meant to contradict the bold. Instead, I meant to justify the bold italic, whereas you just wanted to take it for granted. I think you will find that my explanation is logically permitted by the text above and indeed a plausible interpretation. Do you disagree?

> Luke: At least one of us is not listening to the other. I am generally reticent to accept 100% fault in situations like this. Are you asking me to accept 100% fault?

> Ron: And now I am also telling you that you often express yourself in ways that invite misunderstanding, and then you try to shirk responsibility when you are misunderstood.

The bold here is precisely contradicted by my asking whether I ought to accept 100% fault. (You could have just answered, "Yes.") As to the italic, that may be true. However, when I speak the same way to other people and they don't frequently misunderstand in ways that results in me somehow being portrayed as a bad person (you: "You should be ashamed of yourself for even entertaining such an argument."), I wonder whether the fault is indeed 100% mine. Do you think it is irrational of me to suppose that maybe the fault isn't 100% mine, at least some of the time?

You have heard of Ron's First Law, yes? "All extreme positions are wrong." Do you really think that someone who would coin that aphorism would ever claim that anyone is 100% at fault about anything?

The fact that you would even ask this indicates that you have missed the point so badly that I am utterly at a loss as to how to explain it to you. So I give up. Maybe someone else who has been following this thread wants to chime in here, but I'm done.

@Ron:drawing the line at medical necessity is nonetheless extremely dangerous. It was not that long ago that people fought for the right to decline to serve black people at restaurants.

To be clear, I was only referring to drawing the line as far as when the law is brought in and people sue each other and it goes to the Supreme Court. If nothing else, I think the law has many more serious cases to attend to than a couple not getting the wedding cake they wanted because the store owner was a bigot. But not invoking the law in such cases does not mean nothing should be done.

My personal opinion is that things like that are better handled by simple ostracism: just don't do business with such people. I'm sure the couple could have gotten a wedding cake somewhere else. Similar remarks would apply to restaurants that turn away paying customers because of their race. However, we as a society seem to have settled on invoking the law in such cases. So we'll just have to see how the experiment turns out.

Another analysis is Charles Taylor's 1989 Explanation and Practical Reason.

You seem to have a talent for finding items that I end up having to add to my reading list. :-)

I posit that you cannot legislate morality

I agree. But taking Taylor's strategy II, which as you note he argues can be more effective than I, means understanding that to the people who have taken our society to this point, to the point where a couple can take a lawsuit to the Supreme Court because they didn't get the wedding cake they wanted, that kind of policy is not "legislating morality". It's legislating the rules that everyone who wants to be a member of our society and share in its benefits has to play by. Those rules might not be the ones every member of society would personally prefer (I've already expressed my own opinion in my previous post), but no one set of rules can satisfy everybody.

And that basic problem--what rules should everyone in a civilized society have to play by--is one that every society has to solve. The "modern" Enlightenment solution is certainly open to criticism on various grounds, but one also has to recognize that it has produced tremendous benefits: to name just one, it built the medium in which we are having this conversation.

> You seem to have a talent for finding items that I end up having to add to my reading list. :-)

May the benefit outweigh the curse. :-p

> The "modern" Enlightenment solution is certainly open to criticism on various grounds, but one also has to recognize that it has produced tremendous benefits: to name just one, it built the medium in which we are having this conversation.

I do not deny it has produced tremendous benefits. I don't know how I could exist in a world without computers; just now I'm seeing if I can fire up a 2008 FPGA dev board to have fun and use it as a cheap logic analyzer for characterizing a rotary encoder so I can debounce it properly and allow for maximum rotational speeds. This in turn is to help build a temperature gradient setup for a friend of mine who is a postdoc at UCSF, studying Drosophila larvae. I just love the work and without modern technology, I'd probably be developing catapults or bridges or things. Those don't have as much logistical complexity to tickle my neurons and they take a lot more work and resources to build.

That being said, I think we must be very careful to separate rationality and power. Because I believe this is true:

>> In the Enlightenment tradition, rationality is typically seen as a concept that is well-defined and context-independent. We know what rationality is, and rationality is supposed to be constant over time and place. This study, however, demonstrates that rationality is context-dependent and that the context of rationality is power. Power blurs the dividing line between rationality and rationalization. Rationalization presented as rationality is shown to be a principle strategy in the exercise of power. Kant said that the possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason. We will see that the possession of more power soils reason even more, that the greater the power, the less the rationality. The empirical study is summed up in a number of propositions about the relationship between rationality and power, concluding that power has a rationality that rationality does not know, whereas rationality does not have a power that power does not know. I will argue that this asymmetry between rationality and power forms a basic weakness of modernity and of modern democracy, a weakness that needs to be reassessed in light of the context-dependent nature of rationality, taking a point of departure in thinkers like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Foucault.[2] (Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice, 2)

Note that only the less-powerful have an incentive to do this work. (Well, they might do it secretly as self-defense.) Publicly, the more-powerful have incentive to just let it be, not talk about it, even suppress it. If society is generally deciding how you like, why investigate taken-for-grantendness?

This is actually a perfect example. Asking whether you are 100% at fault is not a legitimate question (the answer is obviously no), it's an attempt to distract from your own culpability by drawing attention to that of others. (Donald Trump is an absolute master of this technique, by the way, quite possibly the greatest practitioner of the craft ever.)

BTW, I overlooked this before:

> Should a non-human organism which cannot have discussions like you and I are now (in a way we can see them) be allowed to have copyright?

No. Of course not. (What does this have to do with legalizing discrimination against gay people? Are you comparing gay people to Macaques? Isn't it annoying when people ask questions whose answers are obvious?)

> maybe we are just too dumb to teach macaques how to think and reason and do science

That could be, but so what? Be the cause as it may, the fact remains that Macaques do not have the capacity to act as competent legal agents in our society. (The exception would be if they lacked this capacity because we were *intentionally* depriving them of the means to achieve it, like when there were laws against teaching black people to read. But that is not the case here. If Macaques are being held back by our ignorance rather than our malice, that's still just dint of circumstance. But I am not aware of any evidence that Macaques, or any other non-human species, has the capacity to understand the concept of intellectual property rights.)

> Would you mind explaining to me what merit you found here? Because it looks like a steaming heap of obfuscated BS to me.

The bold is, by the way, often how I interpret you viewing me. Out of a person's heart, the mouth speaks. Both of our mouths.

> Asking whether you are 100% at fault is not a legitimate question (the answer is obviously no), it's an attempt to distract from your own culpability by drawing attention to that of others.

This was not my intention. I meant to use the words literally. Will you believe this? You could have answered with "maybe 99%, but not 100%". Furthermore, there is the following:

> Ron: How you choose to communicate is up to you. But. at the risk of stating what should be painfully obvious, language doesn't really fulfill its intended purpose if everyone starts using their own private definitions for words.

> Luke: My bad, the first definition at dictionary.com resource is ambiguous and the third is what I meant:>> 1. a source of supply, support, or aid, especially one that can be readily drawn upon when needed.> 2. resources, the collective wealth of a country or its means of producing wealth.> 3. Usually, resources. money, or any property that can be converted into money; assets.> 4. Often, resources. an available means afforded by the mind or one's personal capabilities:to have resource against loneliness.> 5. an action or measure to which one may have recourse in an emergency; expedient.> 6. capability in dealing with a situation or in meeting difficulties:> a woman of resource

Did that merely get expunged from the record? I started it out with "My bad".

I won't know until I've read the book. The fact that I have added it to my reading list does not mean that I will necessarily agree with what it says. It just means that the quote Luke gave, plus reading the Wikipedia page about the book, made me curious enough to want to read it.

Because it looks like a steaming heap of obfuscated BS to me.

I find that a little surprising, considering that one obvious example, from your point of view, of the problem described in that paragraph is the situation you described in your blog post just prior to this one.